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Help:Wiki markup
This page is a tutorial for learning to work with the essential rules of wiki-formatted text, or "wikitext". Wikitext is designed to be as simple as possible so that an article may be quickly typed and styled without having to take a break to type out long HTML codes. The goal is to make it as easy as possible to channel your thoughts into writing the perfect article (or even a not-so-perfect one). Text formatting Creating italicized or bold text is the simplest rule — simply use the apostrophe character in groups of two or three to create the style. (Be sure to use the "straight" apostrophe and not the curved "smart quote" characters used in some text editors and word processors!) To create a tabbed list or a block of text using a monospace font, start the line with a space. (Be sure not to make the line too long, or it will stretch the page horizontally!) Text can also be indented using the colon character. Lists Both unordered and numbered lists are simple to create as well: simply use the asterisk or hash characters at the beginning of a line to create the entry. To create nested lists, simply add an extra asterisk or hash to the front of the line. You can even mix and match the kinds of list in a single group! Links and URLs In a wiki, it's important to help build the web by creating links to other articles in every appropriate context. Use the following techniques to create "free links" to other Faction Paradox Wiki articles: You can also make external links to other websites using the following formatting rules: The "pipe trick" One of the most helpful shortcuts one can learn in linking to articles is the so-called "pipe trick". By placing a pipe (|) after certain strings of text, one can eliminate the need to type huge amounts of replacement text. For example, if the name of a real-world novel is shared with an in-universe book, then it will be "disambiguated" with the parenthetical "(novel)". The Book of the War refers to the in-universe encyclopedia, whereas The Book of the War (novel) links to the page about the actual book. Generally, when writing a sentence about the book, one doesn't want "(novel)" to appear in the body of text. To get rid of it, one must enter some replacement text separated by the full article name by a pipe (|}. The long way of doing that is: Note that the pipe trick won't be detectable if you edit this page and look at how this chart is set up. It actually converts what you type into the long form, after you press "save page". When you might not want to do the pipe trick If the actual name of a thing includes a parenthetical, you wouldn't want to do a pipetrick. For instance, the show Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), which has several Doctor Who cast and crew connections, wouldn't be a good candidate for a pipe trick, because it would resolve to just Randall & Hopkirk, which isn't the full name of the show. So to get a proper Wikipedia link, you have to go the long way: Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased). When the pipe trick doesn't work There are instances when the pipe trick doesn't work, and you have to revert to the "long way". The most common area in which it fails is when trying to make a link within a ''' tag. The other major area is when placed within using a variable within a parser function. This last case is really of concern only to advanced users. The "slash trick" There are some pages here which have a number of subpages. A subpage is a page that branches off of the page one is currently viewing. If this page had a subpage about slash tricks, it would be in the format of . This syntax, however, is how one would link to the subpage from any other page on the wiki. '''On this page only the same link could be generated by typing /Slash trick When entered on this page, the preceding slash stands in for . However, the result of typing in /Slash trick is the rather ugly /Slash trick, that includes the preceding slash. If one wanted to create a link that appeared on this page as just Slash trick, one could type: Slash trick However, this can be simplified even further by typing: /Slash trick/ This eliminates the preceding slash. When you might not want to do the slash trick Generally, getting rid of preceding slashes is a great idea. But there are occasionally times when the preceding slash might need to be retained. For instance, preceding slashes can be used to emphasize to the reader that a subpage is being linked to, rather than a page in the main article space with the same name. A suggested guideline is that if the subpage has the same name as a proper article in mainspace, retain the slash for clarity. Thus /The Chase versus The Chase. Interwiki link There are times when one might wish to link to another wikia. For example, if one wanted to link to Timothy Dalton's page on the James Bond Wiki, one would use the following syntax: articlename or, for this specific case, Timothy Dalton Note that the pipe trick discussed above won't work as well on interwiki links because there are too many preceding colons. A pipe trick does this to an interwiki link: c:jamesbond:Timothy Dalton, which is close, but not really close enough. Thus, to make a "clean" link to an article on another link, one has to type out the whole thing, with replacement text, as shown immediately above. However, Template:TT makes it much easier to link to the , which has many helpful pages about Doctor Who concepts that don't need to be covered here. Said template should always be used in place of w:c:tardis:Ben Jackson or tardis:Ben Jackson. Sections The usual way If an article is long enough, you can divide the page into different sections. You can also create a horizontal divider by using four dashes in a row. Another approach to headers The above method doesn't just generate a header. It also automatically creates a little edit link beside the header, allowing the user to edit just that section. But there are times when one may wish to have a sectional header that isn't editable. This is particularly true in templates which generate a lot of text that need to be sectionalized for greater understanding. To achieve section heads which don't produce an edit link, use the following simple code: Header, where x stands for the number of equal signs (=) you want. For example, Header is the edit-link-less version of Header Images and other media :Please see separate help files on and gallery markup Tables :See: Paradox:Tables Mathematical formulae :See: Templates A template is a pre-defined bit of coding that places the same text across multiple pages. It can be as simple as a little link redirect such as Template:TT, to a fairly complicated bit of coding that automatically calculates dates based upon the name of an article, like Template:Timeline. One of the types of template you will most come into contact with here is the "infobox" template. These save you a great deal of repetitive typing of similar information, such as is found on television story or novel pages. Put in your edit, replacing "template" with the name of the specific one you are using, such "Infobox Group". For infoboxes, you will need to fill in the variables accepted by the template, such as director, writer, or broadcast date. The actual writing of templates is a complicated subject, beyond the scope of this article. :See also: Magic words Beyond the templates that we have created are templates that are inherent in the MediaWiki software. These are not fully listed anywhere on this wiki, and do not appear in Category:Templates. A good place to start one's understanding of these type of templates is at Wikipedia:Help:Magic words. They are called "magic" because they do things with one simple word that conceals rather a lot of complicated coding. Most editors of wikis, even those very experienced with template coding, don't really understand the underlying code that makes them work. Hence, as was once remarked in Battlefield, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic words include things like , which returns the name of the page you're on; , which tells you the current day; , which strips a page of its table of contents; , which compares two strings, and then takes action depending on whether they match; and , which automatically forces an article to sort in a category in a certain way. If you'd like more details, please see . Suppressing markup It's also possible to tell MediaWiki to ignore any of the above rules using a simple tag: Category:The Hub Category:Help